Battle of the Ajax Mail Packages

Traditionally, there have been two paths to choose from when considering
mail servers. The Redmond path was some variety of Microsoft Exchange
Server with Outlook as the client, and possibly POP3/IMAP and Web mail
as a backup when out of the office.

The other path, the path of the penguin, was Sendmail or Postfix, or
possibly a more obscure mail transport agent (MTA) with POP3 and IMAP
as the connection to the mail client of your choice. If you wanted Web
mail, you'd use a package such as SquirrelMail running under Apache. There
were, of course, other choices, such as Lotus Notes, but by and large, most
e-mail installations used one of these two solutions.

Recently, the e-mail landscape has changed dramatically. For one thing,
rich client tools such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail have shown the promise of
Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML), taking Web mail from a standby
of last resort for travelers to a fully usable replacement for an e-mail
application such as Outlook or Evolution. More significantly, several
companies either have reached or are very close to the Holy Grail of
open-source e-mail, complete Exchange compatibility.

I'm sure there are many die-hard Linux folks out there who are silently
saying, “who cares?” But the reality is that in most
corporate-IT
environments, Outlook and Exchange are a well-entrenched aspect of the
company mentality. And, it's hard to blame companies for clinging to
them.
The terrible twosome are full of useful features, such as meeting and
calendar integration, that make them highly useful. On the other hand,
it would be difficult to find a Windows sysadmin willing to describe
administering an Exchange server as a pleasurable experience.

At last, these beleaguered MCSEs have a choice that doesn't involve
dumping Outlook and training their employees to use an entirely new
mail system. Projects such as OpenExchange, Zimbra and Scalix promise
the ability to phase out Windows-based Exchange servers without the end
users noticing.

Two of these projects, Scalix and Zimbra, are particularly promising
because they include highly functional Ajax clients as part of their
offerings. In this article, we look at the two, head to head.

Zimbra is an open-source project with a proprietary network edition,
which includes features such as product support, clustering and, in the
future, Outlook connectivity via MAPI. If you can make do without these
features, you're free to run the open-source edition and get support
in the forums. The network edition isn't cheap though, running you
$28 US/user with a 500-user minimum (or $1,500 US for a 50-user small-business
license). Significantly, Zimbra is still in beta, although it's well
along in the development cycle.

Scalix, in comparison, is fully closed source. It offers two different
versions, a community edition and an enterprise edition. As with Zimbra,
the enterprise edition will cost you money, and it comes with support. The
difference is that the Scalix community edition provides all the
functionality of the enterprise edition. However, the advanced features, such as MAPI compatibility (which lets you use Outlook directly with the
mail server for calendar and contact management), are available only for
25 users. After that, you'll be paying $60/user.

Installation Quirks

We tested both products under Fedora Core 4. For Zimbra, that and Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 4
are your only official Linux choices (at least for a supported, binary
install). Scalix offers those distributions as well, but adds several
flavors of SUSE to the supported list. Both products install without
much hair pulling; you answer a few simple questions (at least, simple
if you're familiar with setting up mail servers), and the installation
scripts do the rest.

At this point, I need to mention one of the irritating quirks of
Zimbra. It installs its SMTP, POP3, IMAP and HTTP/HTTPS servers in
high-numbered ports, and then uses iptables to map to them. So, for
example, port 80 gets mapped to port 7070, where Zimbra runs its Web-mail
client. This can come as a nasty surprise if you install Zimbra on a
host with an existing Web server.

By comparison, Scalix keeps all its network ports off existing Web
services, although it does take over mail-related ports such as SMTP
and IMAP, but that's what you'd expect a mail server to do.

Scalix has its own dangers for the unwary. You had better be familiar
with LDAP and how it specifies distinguished names. Scalix is all about
LDAP. To be fair, Scalix is trying to operate as a drop-in replacement for
Exchange, and Exchange makes heavy use of LDAP in its Active Directory
architecture. So this isn't an unexpected development. However, for a
sysadmin familiar with Sendmail doing a first-time install of Scalix,
a close reading of the documentation is in order.

Figure 1. Both products come with a Web-based administration interface.

Good review, it matched my findings when I evaluated the products, but infinitely better worded than I could ever put it.

The thing that I find is still missing is true interoperability with Linux PIM clients such as Kontact and Evolution while still offering Outlook compatibility.

My office is a mix of Windows and Linux machines running Outlook and Kontact respectively and there isn't a product that allows me to co-ordinate the various calendars, email and address books on both platforms simultaneously.

no, i don't work for scalix. i'm just in the process of trying to replace exchange w/ a solution that will be better than what users currently have. i haven't tested scalix yet (i'm waiting for them to send me the link to download the trial enterprise edition), otherwise i'd list things you all might find helpful.

atmail works quite nice and is stable. Two other groupware solutions based on ajax webtech with calendar sharing and integrated outlook support are:
- kerio
- zarafa
Both have .com sites with free downloads.

This thread is old, but still relevant. I bought Atmail in part based on good reviews here. The product is okay overall, but some features simply don't work and the support is just terrible. Most requests are simply ignored, others they might get back to you in a few weeks telling you to check the permissions. Then they disappear again for weeks at a time. Save your money!

I haven't been following the development of Exchange compatible servers or webmail packages, and I was properly impressed by these two. It seems, between Firefox, OpenOffice 2.0 and these Exchange replacements, Microsoft really has something to look out for.

These are not the only two ajax mail packages. An article of this type is not complete unless you also mention Citadel, a groupware/collaboration server of the same caliber as Zimbra and Scalix, which also contains AJAX functionality. Unlike these two, Citadel is community developed and is a true open source project. It contains AJAX webmail, a calendar and address book, and a slew of features that you won't find in any other package. Please have a look at it. http://www.citadel.org

I used Citadel as a stand-in mail server for several months, just took it down a few weeks ago.

It's a Zimbra-like system (I say that only having seen Zimbra screenshots) that's designed to act like a BBS. (That is where Citadel's roots are...if you're too young you'll have no idea what I mean.)

It was on the buggy side, but functional. I can't, however, see someone replacing an Exchange server with it though unless they have only the lightest of requirements. There were only incremental improvements to the webmail interface vs. squirrelmail. (e.g. searching; however that was one of the least functional features.)

Their support forum (on the Uncensored! Citadel) is quite active and I had all good experiences when I went there for help.

Also, I'd imagine things have changed at least a little bit since I installed.

For the record, I ended up putting money into Apple's 10.5 Server for its (well-)integrated postfix-based mail solution (and everything else...impressive feature set).

P.S. If you're already an experienced Linux admin and are familiar with configuring Linux mail systems, you may have a much different (better) experience that I did. I'm fairly new at both. It was definitely easy to set up initially, but I didn't have much of a clue where to go when something wasn't working or (even worse) just wasn't working quite right.

Great to see such a thorough review. Thanks for including our product in this roundup and for the feedback. Thought you might be interested in a preview of our latest release, Scalix 10, currently in beta and shipping in February.

A quick word about Scalix's open source strategy, which is based on a hybrid model. The Scalix Server license is not an open source license today, due to 3rd party restrictions. Specifically, Scalix's technology heritage hails from HP OpenMail. We are working to remove these restrictions so that we can open source our server. In new areas of development, like ScalixConnect for Evolution which is licensed under the GPL, we are pursuing open source licensing today.

Thank you for the review on our August 2005 Beta 1 Release. We at Zimbra are continuing to move our product forward based on detailed and constructive feedback like what you have provided. I wanted to offer an update on our Beta 3 Update that was just released.

1) We have removed the dependency on iptables and we have made it easier for Zimbra to co-exist with other services running on a server.

2) We have complete support for Firefox and Thunderbird 1.5 and we continue to line up our testing with new versions of these products.

3) We have released the ZCS Connector for Microsoft Outlook and it is included in the 60 day trial version of our Network Edition.

Thank you again for the help in making Zimbra better and we hope to continue to respond to your reviews.

While I am glad to see the Citadel and atMail options, I think they were likely left out of the review because they don't appear to fit the theme. The review was not, as I understood it, about webmail clients that use AJAX, but ones *based* on it.

To me that means not using a preponderance of frames and such, but actual AJAX to update portions of the page.

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